The slasher that broke the reindeer’s back? VHS Revival Investigates

Some movies are a victim of their time.

Whatever one may think of Charles E. Sellier’s exploitative festive slasherSilent Night, Deadly Night, one thing is for certain: it has found a rather prominent place in horror‘s rich and varied history.

Back in the winter of 1984, the movie was pulled from theatres a week after its release due to widespread protests regarding an advertising campaign which depicted jolly old Saint Nick as a bloodthirsty killer. Incredulously, those ads ran on prime time television, which led to an almost medieval backlash from PTA members who had left their children watching Little House on the Prairie, only to return to a nation of distraught preteens keeping an unusually sharp eye on their chimneys.

That backlash soon became an all-out witch hunt as an equally exploitative mainstream media fuelled the fires of a very real horror. This was irrationality at its most fervent, led by a generation of critics who were quick to wheel out the proverbial guillotine, denouncing the film as worthless and immoral, while mainstream critics Siskel and Ebert, both infamous for their scathing hatred of the slasher genre, went as far as reading the names of the movie’s production crew on air, claiming that every penny made was tantamount to ‘blood money’. The fact that nobody involved with the movie was injured as a consequence is nothing short of miraculous.

The ‘Video Nasties’ and slashers in general were the subject of so much sensationalism that as a kid the very words sent chills down your spine. I would spend hours wondering just how treacherous banned movies such as I Spit On Your Grave and the legendary Faces of Death actually were, and those adults who claimed to have seen them delighted in further hyping the mystery, safe in the knowledge that I would never be able to witness the real deal—at least at the time. That was the genius of the low-budget VHS boom. The hype, the cynical promotional campaigns, the often misleading and always wonderful posters and VHS cover art, they were all a part of the mystique, and distributors were only too happy to fan the flames and put butts in seats, fully aware that their movies didn’t stand a chance of living up to the marketing puffery.

Mother Superior: They thought they could do it without being caught. But when we do something naughty, we are always caught. Then, we are punished. Punishment is absolute, punishment is good.

So, is the movie that broke the reindeer’s back truly worthy of its notoriety? Of course not. In fact, it doesn’t even come close. In my opinion, no horror movie is worthy of such treatment because what we are watching is fiction, plain and simple, and if anyone is to blame for the brief psychological damage it did to a generation of horrified children it is those sloppy folks at the stations who allowed the movie’s ad campaign to be aired at a time when minors may have been exposed to it. Murder was around long before this sub-genre came into existence. I mean, we’re all adults here. If we find a movie to be tasteless or immoral then we have the right to steer clear of it. If we believe that a movie lacks any kind of value all one has to do is look away.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that there were other Christmas and even Santa-related slashers long before moral outrage covered itself in sleigh bells. In 1974, director Bob Clark practically wrote the rule book with yuletide stabfest Black Christmas, while 1980 saw the release of Christmas Evil, a bizarre character study which saw a seasonally depressed man dress up as Kris Kringle and go on a deadly killing spree. The latter of those movies featured an almost identical premise to Silent Night Deadly Night, as well as a vague subtext concerning sexuality and gender-swapping, yet parents and critics hardly made a peep.

Of course, the cinematic landscape had altered quite drastically since 1980. 1984 saw the British Parliament’s passing of the Video Recordings Act, which forced all video releases to appear before the British Board of Film Classification after a moral campaign led to local jurisdictions prosecuting video releases for obscenity, leading to the notorious ‘Video Nasty’ scandal and the outright banning of 72 films that were believed to violate the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. Across the pond, pre-cert horror was subjected to similar treatment, particularly the Friday the 13th Franchise, Paramount’s spuriously titled The Final Chapter proving to be just that in terms of everything that made the franchise worthwhile as a series of diminishing sequels sluiced through the cutting floor like so much rotten meat.

Silent Night Deadly Night is a tepid affair at best. For those with a taste for stalk-and-slash inanity, it more than justifies its cult status, while a series of sequels proved there is a market for its inimitable brand of mindless hokum, but as an exercise in obscenity it ranks somewhere near the bottom, and I could think of fifty slashers more qualified to break the reindeer’s back as a familiar set-up sees a young boy succumb to a premature tragedy that leaves him with a rather nasty aversion to both sex and Santa.

Grandpa: You see Santa Claus tonight you better run boy, you better run for ya life!

After seeing his parents slayed by a stick-up artist dressed in Coca-Cola’s most subliminal colours, soon-to-be-antagonist Billy Chapman (Robert Brian Wilson) is subjected to the religious perversions of Mother Superior (Lilyan Chauvin), a fine actress who must have been in serious need of a cash injection. So out of place are her talents that Silent Night Deadly Night feels like two movies glued haphazardly together, her earlier scenes providing a serious set-up for an utterly ludicrous finale which lacks any of the artistic or technical merit initially implied. Even the movie’s kills prove tame thanks to a painfully thin budget which lays waste to the Savini-esque magic found in other slice-and-dice vehicles, substituting any real practical effects for cut-away deaths or knife attacks which resemble someone drawing on cast members with a red fountain pen, while a poor video transfer could not be salvaged even upon a recent Blu-ray release.

That’s not to say that Silent Night Deadly Night isn’t enjoyable, and if anything the movie excels not in its ability to outrage, but in its sheer absurdity as our unhinged leading man is forced to dress up as Santa at a local toy store, resulting in a series of improbable visual triggers which inspire the obligatory time-consuming flashbacks that would later constitute half of the sequel’s running time. Wilson cuts a figure of ineptitude as our lumbering killer, tripping and bumbling his way from victim to victim as he makes his inevitable return to the orphanage that made him. The movie’s standout kills—a sled-bound beheading and a seasonal impalement—are surely played for laughs, and genre hounds will get a kick out of a young Linnea Quigley running around in the buff, generously flaunting the assets that would make her such a cult figure in movie’s like the delightfully Absurd Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers.

In the end, the film is a victim of its own hype, or at least the hype that was bestowed upon it by disgruntled parents and governments, who capitalised on the ‘Video Nasty’ scandal as a means to strip society of its civil liberties. The movie is largely underwhelming and technically cack-handed, but as an exercise in marketing and promotion you have to take your Santa hats off to it. This was a movie which outgrossed Wes Craven’s seminal slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street during its opening weekend, a production that proves itself infinitely superior in just about every way imaginable, but one that was guaranteed to smash the box office for a quite incredible return given its lifespan.

Slashers have gained a widespread cult following throughout the years, thanks in large part to the joyous capacity of nostalgia as genre fans remember those heady days with a taboo lust rather than dwelling on the outrage of media-spun moral panic. Whatever verbal loathing the critics may fling their way, at the end of the day the majority of these filmmakers were not looking to win any awards. They simply saw the chance to make movies the way Romero and Carpenter had before them: cheaply and with the opportunity of recouping a small fortune. Those filmmakers lack the genius and foresight of the industry’s finest, but they exploited their way to a payday and had a bloody good time doing it, both literally and figuratively.